With generous support from the Ford Foundation’s Good Neighbor Committee, EVC provided professional development and in-class coaching for teachers from the ACCESS GED program in Manhattan to support the implementation of EVC’s community documentary curriculum in their extended day program. Through this program, the students created a powerful documentary on the impact of religion. In addition, this grant funded researchers from the Center for Children and Technology/EDC to design and pilot test at the ACCESS site evaluation instruments that will support the scale up of EVC’s methodology in other school districts. These evaluation frameworks will better allow EVC staff to observe, document, and assess the process of local adaptation while maintaining the rigor and quality of the EVC curriculum model. EVC expects the collection of uniform evaluation data across multiple sites will support both ongoing formative evaluation to inform program improvement, and outcome evaluation to demonstrate program quality and impact. The key questions to be addressed by this effort are:
Which are the most essential promising practices drawn from EVC’s Documentary Workshop model that can be transferred and successfully applied in External Education Program school settings?
How can these practices be made visible and measurable to support the monitoring and evaluation of program implementation as the program is brought to scale on a national basis?